NEW YORK TIMES 1-13-018 Uranium Miners Pushed Hard for Comeback

Uranium Miners Pushed Hard for a Comeback. They Got Their Wish.

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MONUMENT VALLEY, Utah — Garry Holiday grew up among the abandoned mines that dot the Navajo Nation’s red landscape, remnants of a time when uranium helped cement America’s status as a nuclear superpower and fueled its nuclear energy program.

It left a toxic legacy. All but a few of the 500 abandoned mines still await cleanup. Mining tainted the local groundwater. Mr. Holiday’s father succumbed to respiratory disease after years of hacking the ore from the earth.

But now, emboldened by the Trump administration’s embrace of corporate interests, the uranium mining industry is renewing a push into the areas adjacent to Mr. Holiday’s Navajo Nation home: the Grand Canyon watershed to the west, where a new uranium mine is preparing to open, and the Bears Ears National Monument to the north.

The Trump administration is set to shrink Bears Ears by 85 percent next month, potentially opening more than a million acres to mining, drilling and other industrial activity. But even as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke declared last month that “there is no mine within Bears Ears,” there were more than 300 uranium mining claims inside the monument, according to data from Utah’s Bureau of Land Management office that was reviewed by The New York Times.

The vast majority of those claims fall neatly outside the new boundaries of Bears Ears set by the administration. And an examination of local B.L.M. records, including those not yet entered into the agency’s land and mineral use authorizations database, shows that about a third of the claims are linked to Energy Fuels, a Canadian uranium producer. Energy Fuels also owns the Grand Canyon mine, where groundwater has already flooded the main shaft.

Energy Fuels, together with other mining groups, lobbied extensively for a reduction of Bears Ears, preparing maps that marked the areas it wanted removed from the monument and distributing them during a visit to the monument by Mr. Zinke in May.

Garry Holiday in the Navajo Nation, the largest American Indian territory in the United States. His father worked in uranium mines and died from respiratory disease. Credit Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

The Uranium Producers of America, an industry group, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw regulations proposed by the Obama administration to strengthen groundwater protections at uranium mines. Mining groups have also waged a six-year legal battle against a moratorium on new uranium mining on more than a million acres of land adjacent to the Grand Canyon.

For the Navajo, the drive for new mines is a painful flashback.

“Back then, we didn’t know it was dangerous — nobody told us,” Mr. Holiday said, as he pointed to the gashes of discolored rocks that mark where the old uranium mines cut into the region’s mesas. “Now they know. They know.”

Supporters of the mining say that a revival of domestic uranium production, which has declined by 90 percent since 1980 amid slumping prices and foreign competition, will make the United States a larger player in the global uranium market.

It would expand the country’s energy independence, they say, and give a lift to nuclear power, still a pillar of carbon-free power generation. Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, Russia and a few other countries now supply most of America’s nuclear fuel.

“If we consider nuclear a clean energy, if people are serious about that, domestic uranium has to be in the equation,” said Jon J. Indall, a lawyer for Uranium Producers of America. “But the proposed regulations would have had a devastating impact on our industry.”

“Countries like Kazakhstan, they’re not under the same environmental standards. We want a level playing field.”

Scaling back a monument

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Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke visiting the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah last year. Mr. Zinke has said mining was not a consideration in the decision to shrink the monument. Credit Scott G Winterton/The Deseret News, via Associated Press

The trip was one of the earliest made by Mr. Zinke to the vast lands he oversees as secretary of the interior: a visit to Bears Ears, where he struck a commanding figure, touring the rugged terrain on horseback.

A notable presence on Mr. Zinke’s trip was Energy Fuels, the Canadian uranium producer. Company executives openly lobbied for shrinking Bears Ears’ borders, handing out the map that marked the pockets the company wanted removed: areas adjacent to its White Mesa Mill, just to the east of the monument, and its Daneros Mine, which it is developing just to the west.

“They wanted to talk to anyone who’d listen,” said Commissioner Phil Lyman of San Juan County, Utah, a Republican who participated in the tour and is sympathetic to Energy Fuels’ position. “They were there representing their business interest.”

Mr. Zinke has insisted that mining played no role in the decision to shrink Bears Ears, and a department spokeswoman said he had met with interested parties on all sides.

In theory, even after President Barack Obama established Bears Ears in 2016, mining companies could have developed any of the claims within it, given proper local approvals. But companies say that expanding the sites, or even building roads to access them, would have required special permits, driving up costs.

Curtis Moore, an Energy Fuels spokesman, said the company had played only a small part in the decision to shrink Bears Ears. The company proposed scaling back the monument by just 2.5 percent, he said, and was prepared to support a ban within the rest of the original boundaries.

Yet two weeks after Mr. Zinke’s visit, Energy Fuels wrote to the Interior Department arguing there were many other known uranium deposits within Bears Ears “that could provide valuable energy and mineral resources in the future” and urging the department to shrink the monument away from any “existing or future operations.”

A bill introduced last month by Representative John Curtis, Republican of Utah, would codify Mr. Trump’s cuts to the monument while banning further drilling or mining within the original boundaries. But environmental groups say the bill has little chance of passing at all, let alone before the monument is scaled back next month.

“Come February, anyone can place a mining claim on the land,” said Greg Zimmerman, deputy director at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group.

New mine, new challenges

Outside Moab, UT the federal government still conducts clean up operations of uranium mine tailings from the late-1940s that leach into the...

Walter Ingram

January 14, 2018

First of all, Secretary Zinke fits right into the Trump administration, a liar and beholden to moneyed interests.Secondly, one wonders if...

Jack McL

January 14, 2018

"Energy Fuels said it had sold its Bears Ears claims to a smaller company, Encore Energy, in 2016. But Encore issued shares to Energy Fuels...

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Workers at Energy Fuels’ new Canyon Mine, a few miles south of the Grand Canyon, had to pump contaminated groundwater into open ponds, where they used industrial sprayers to speed evaporation. Credit Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

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Left, the headframe atop the shaft at Canyon Mine. Right, a woodpecker near the shuttered Orphan Mine, a partially reclaimed Superfund site near the Grand Canyon’s South Rim. Credit Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

At the end of a dirt road just six miles from the Grand Canyon’s South Rim, the uranium industry’s renewed ambitions, and challenges, are on display.

Three decades after exploratory drilling uncovered uranium deposits, production at Energy Fuels’ Canyon Mine is finally starting up, the wheel above a 1,500-foot shaft slowly turning during a recent visit. The company calls Canyon Mine a “high-grade” project, with the potential to compete with mines overseas.

It is already running into trouble.

As workers drilled into the formations that make up the region’s distinct rock layers last year, they hit shallow groundwater. The water flooded the mine’s shaft, forcing workers to pump the runoff — by then contaminated with uranium — into open ponds, where they used industrial sprayers to speed evaporation. Those sprayers were present during a recent visit, and water could be seen from outside the compound continuing to pour into a large evaporation pond.

Energy Fuels officials said hitting shallow groundwater was to be expected, and rejected concerns that contamination could escape.

Still, Fred Tillman, an environmental engineer with the United States Geological Survey, said during a recent visit to the mine that the groundwater flows in the region were too complex to rule out the risk of contamination.

“There are these big unknowns about the potential impacts on cultural resources, on biological resources, on water resources,” Dr. Tillman said.

A senator steps in

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Traces from uranium mining are still visible on the side of a mesa in Monument Valley, where Mr. Holiday lives. Credit Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

Even as troubles persist on the ground, the industry pushback has continued.

In court, mining groups led by the National Mining Association have challenged a 20-year moratorium on mining in the Grand Canyon watershed, established in 2012 by the Obama administration. (The Canyon Mine predates the moratorium.)

The Arizona Chamber of Commerce, which represents mining interests, also backed an effort to defeat a separate proposal that would have permanently banned mining on 1.7 million acres surrounding the Grand Canyon. An Energy Fuels executive testified in Congress against the ban.

And with the help of Republican senators like John Barrasso of Wyoming, the industry has pressed the E.P.A. to withdraw an Obama-era proposal that would strengthen groundwater protections at uranium mines.

The proposal would regulate a mining method called in-situ recovery, which involves injecting a solution into aquifers containing uranium and bringing that solution to the surface for processing — a method criticized by environmentalists as posing wider contamination risks.

A town still struggles

Tommy Rock discovered that the people of Sanders, Ariz., had been exposed to potentially dangerous levels of uranium in their drinking water for years. The Sanders school district had to shut off fountains. Credit Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

The Navajo town of Sanders, Ariz., a dusty outpost with a single stoplight, is a reminder of uranium’s lasting environmental legacy.

In Sanders, hundreds of people were exposed to potentially dangerous levels of uranium in their drinking water for years, until testing by a doctoral researcher at Northern Arizona University named Tommy Rock exposed the contamination.

Mr. Rock and other scientists say they suspect a link to the 1979 breach of a wastewater pond at a uranium mill in Church Rock, N.M., now a Superfund site. That accident is considered the single largest release of radioactive material in American history, surpassing the crisis at Three Mile Island.

It wasn’t until 2003, however, that testing by state regulators picked up uranium levels in Sanders’s tap water. Still, the community was not told. Erin Jordan, a spokeswoman for the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, said the department had urged the now-defunct local water company for years to address the contamination, but it had been up to that company to notify its customers.

Only in 2015, after Mr. Rock raised the alarm, did local regulators issue a public notice.

The town’s school district, whose wells were also contaminated with uranium, received little state or federal assistance. It shut off its water fountains and handed out bottled water to its 800 elementary and middle-school students.

“I still don’t trust the water,” said Shanon Sangster, who still sends her 10-year-old daughter, Shania, to school with bottled water. “It’s like we are all scarred by it, by the uranium.”

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A family filled water containers in the Navajo Nation. The nearest untainted well is 25 miles from their home. Credit Caitlin O'Hara for The New York Times

Correction: January 15, 2018

An earlier version of a map with this article showed an incorrect location for the Daneros Mine. As the article correctly noted, the mine is outside the current boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument, not inside.